Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Feature: King Tut's Treasures: Perfumes, Alabaster Vessels and Wine for the Afterlife

“In this Heritage Key video, Dr. Janice Kamrin, head of the Egyptian Museum Database Project, shows and discusses some of the lifestyle objects found in Tutankhamun’s tomb by Carter in 1922, and now housed in The Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Board games, and containers for perfumes, cosmetics and unguents, are amongst the objects shown in this video that give an insight into the livestyles of the rich and famous ancient Egyptians. You can catch up on the previous videos in this series when Dr Kamrin looks at Animal iconography (Watch the video), The Canopic Shrine, Chest and Jars (Watch the video) and last week's video on the Ritual Figures inside the tomb of King Tut (Watch the video).

A Senet game box with game pieces is one of the most intricate and impressive pieces described by Dr Kamrin. King Tut was evidently a big fan of senet, as evidenced by the number of board games found in his tomb. Senet is known to have associations with the gods and goddesses. Dr. Kamrin refers a passage from The Book of The Dead where you would have to play against an invisible opponent and you have to win in order to progress into your own afterlife, although the exact rules of the game are unknown.”

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This blog was set up in 2004 to aggregate news about Egyptology and related topics from online sources on a regular basis. It was closed finally in September 2013 due to other commitments. It has been left open as an archive, but comments have been disabled.